Author: Suzanne

This January, Forest Unlimited will be planting approximately 1,300 one-year old redwood seedlings for reforestation and erosion control in a community forest in the hills west of Cazadero.

The planting dates are Friday, January 8, 2017 and Saturday, January 9, 2017.

On each day, we will rendezvous at 8:15 a.m at Duncans Mills. The seedlings average about 16-inches in height (root ball included) and are not difficult to plant.

All equipment and a free indoor lunch, including drinks and snacks, will be provided. Vegetarian food will also be available.

To properly plan for this event, it is essential that you contact us and sign up for the date(s) of your choice. To sign up and/or to ask any questions, please contact Carl Wahl, Project Manager, at 874-9268 or carlwahl3@gmail.com. Further information on the rendezvous location, appropriate attire, etc. will be sent to all volunteers by mid December. Please mark your calendar, tell your friends, and thanks.

Santa Rosa City Council and business leaders’ plan for the old courthouse square began to be evident in February 2016 as the first 20 of 91 trees to be removed were cut. The claim is that it’s the best plan to revitalize downtown. Revitalization efforts come at the cost of the lost of many mature trees to allow for more parking and widening a road.

by Alex Hutchinson, The New Yorker

In 1984, a researcher named Roger Ulrich noticed a curious pattern among patients who were recovering from gallbladder surgery at a suburban hospital in Pennsylvania. Those who had been given rooms overlooking a small stand of deciduous trees were being discharged almost a day sooner, on average, than those in otherwise identical rooms whose windows faced a wall. The results seemed at once obvious—of course a leafy tableau is more therapeutic than a drab brick wall—and puzzling. Whatever curative property the trees possessed, how were they casting it through a pane of glass?

That is the riddle that underlies a new study in the journal Scientific Reports by a team of researchers in the United States, Canada, and Australia, led by the University of Chicago psychology professor Marc Berman. The study compares two large data sets from the city of Toronto, both gathered on a block-by-block level; the first measures the distribution of green space, as determined from satellite imagery and a comprehensive list of all five hundred and thirty thousand trees planted on public land, and the second measures health, as assessed by a detailed survey of ninety-four thousand respondents. After controlling for income, education, and age, Berman and his colleagues showed that an additional ten trees on a given block corresponded to a one-per-cent increase in how healthy nearby residents felt. “To get an equivalent increase with money, you’d have to give each household in that neighborhood ten thousand dollars—or make people seven years younger,” Berman told me.

by Alicia K. Gonzales, Santa Clara Magazine

How Andrew P. Hill and Robert Kenna, S.J. helped preserve the California redwoods.

Photo by Andrew P. Hill, courtesy of History San Jose.

Coast redwoods are among the wonders of the natural world. Alas, by the end of the 19th century, most of Sequoia sempervirens in the Santa Cruz Mountains had been felled for timber. But saws and axes spared some giants thanks in part to lifetime friends and Santa Clara classmates: photographer Andrew P. Hill and college president Robert Kenna, S.J.